The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to recording data onto an optical storage medium, and more particularly, to methods for overwrite cycle improvement of an optical storage medium (e.g., a rewritable optical disc) and related machine readable media which stores instructions for performing steps of the methods.
Optical storage media, such as rewritable optical discs, have become popular data carriers nowadays. In general, old data stored on a rewritable optical disc can be overwritten by new data. Particularly, certain regions on a rewritable optical disc may be overwritten frequently. For example, direct over-write (DOW) is frequently performed upon the recording management data (RMD) of a DVD-RW disc, the formatting disk control block (FDCB) of a DVD+RW disc, the defect management area (DMA) of a BD-RE/DVD-RAM disc, and the file structures. In general, regarding the frequently overwritten regions, old data contents before overwritten and new data contents used for overwriting may be quite similar to each other. The readability of a region where the data overwriting has been performed many times may be poor, leading to a shorter lifetime of the rewritable optical disc.
Moreover, even though the old data contents and the new data contents are different, the sector identifier (sector ID) of the same frequently overwritten region is the same. The readability of the sector ID for the region where the data overwriting may be poor, therefore affects the access of user data stored in the region identified by the sector ID.
To increase the number of available DOW cycles, a conventional solution adjusts the write power or servo parameters (e.g., a closed loop gain). However, due to the inherent variations of the optical discs/optical disc drives, the conventional solution has difficulty in keeping the number of available DOW cycles of any rewritable optical disc above an acceptable level.